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On Friday 23 November 2007 12:59, Dave Berkeley wrote: > On Friday 23 November 2007 12:47:09 James Fidell wrote: > > Henry Bremridge wrote: > > > As a nontechie, am I missing something? > > > > > > If the details were in a database then all it would require is for > > > someone to delete 3 fields: ie 2 minutes of tech time plus computer > > > time to remove the fields from 25m records > > > > > > £5000 seems a bit extreme > > > > I imagine they'd have to write some sort of proposal, submit it to EDS > > for a quote, get the quote approved by all the necessary people, get > > the work done and pay EDS, get EDS to do the job properly this time, > > pay them again and then extract and send the data. £5k seems quite > > cheap, really. > > > > James > > you beat me to it: > > £5,000 seems pretty cheap to get EDS or Logica to advise on how to extract > data from a database. It is the difference between "Select *", and "Select > name, ...". Requirements capture, consultation, tendering etc. would come > to far more than that. The HM Gov staff would need to be trained in using > the CD burner software, do health and safety risk analysis etc. for the > task. Then there would be the problem of encoding the data in some > proprietary form on the disk, to make it compatible with the Windows XXXX > tools used by the recipient. > > They might have felt it was cheaper to contract out the role and pay > someone to manually edit all the fields, as this was less of a technical > hurdle for them. This would have taken many hours. > > Far better to just pop the whole thing in the post. > > :) D What you fail to realise is that there must have been a clause about generating audit data in the original contract. Thus EDS should have generated it for free. They knew that but I bet they never let on! Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html